Ballaraba Saidu sits on the mud floor of her dimly lit house in Ungwa Uku, Kano state, with her six-month-old daughter, Ummasalama, squirming irritably in her lap and her eldest daughter, two-year-old Sadeya, tottering precariously at her side.

On a long flight last weekend, I watched a scarily earnest mother use one of those your-baby-can-read books to teach vocabulary words to her six-month-old daughter, who stared at the pages in total bafflement.

The battle for Zawiya, which sits just 50 kilometers 30 miles west of Tripoli, has emerged as a defining make or break fight for rebels riding a three-week wave of momentum in which they have made the biggest gains of the six-month-old war.